"The U.S. government is a virtuoso counter," The Guardian's Tom McCarthy asks. "So why can't it count people killed by police?"

It is a confounding question.

After a cop in Ferguson, Mo., shot unarmed teen Michael Brown last summer, we went looking for Michigan statistics — the data that would tell us how many residents of our state die or are seriously injured at the hands of police officers every year. We were shocked to find such numbers are not available; they're simply not recorded at the state level.

In theory, a phone call to each of Michigan's 83 counties could yield the information, assuming each county's prosecutor investigates officer-involved shootings. But that's not the case in every Michigan county.

It's unclear how many of Michigan's more than 1,000 cities, villages and townships operate police departments, but calling them all might not help. There's no uniform reporting requirement, and thus no guarantee that effort would yield an accurate picture.

That's true across the nation. In short, crucial information about how our society functions, a key element in building an equitable justice system, just isn't there.

McCarthy's story should stand as the definitive examination of a system that simply cannot account for the deaths it has been tasked to measure; repairing this unreasonable deficit should be a priority for all of us, most pointedly municipal, state and federal elected officials, who must take the first steps to ensure this date is collected.

The very agency charged with compiling such data at the federal level ceased its efforts last year, not very long before Michael Brown was fatally shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, The Guardian reported, after years of inability to provide a comprehensive statistic.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics tried to count all civilian deaths in the presence of law enforcement, a number that would include both Eric Garner, choked to death while resisting arrest on Staten Island, and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old with no police record shot by officers who were told he had a gun.

But it couldn't. At the end of its run, the project's leaders found that the data they'd been collecting were not sound for a host of reasons, ranging from departmental culture — whether officer-involved shootings were considered problematic, and reported — to technical infrastructure problems that hampered data reporting.

Other data-gathering efforts by the FBI and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are likewise problematic. The FBI measures justifiable police homicides (and states' reporting participation is voluntary); the CDC's report depends on information provided by coroners, who may or may not note that a victim's death came at the hands of law enforcement.

But, because the FBI is required to publish such reports, even if compiled from inadequate data, the number of people killed by police is vastly understated, The Guardian reported — roughly half never appear in official reports.

Why? There are no uniform reporting procedures for officer-involved deaths among the nation's roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies. Even if such incidents are documented locally, most states don't require local governments to report upward; nor does the federal government require states to report to it.

Data are more reliable when culled from and confirmed by multiple sources — checking police records against news reports or community activists' records, for example. That takes time, and money.

The Guardian's meticulous reporting suggests the flawed numbers that are available don't tell anything close to the whole story. If the numbers the newspaper has compiled are correct, there's good reason to believe an average of 928 Americans die each year at the hands of law enforcement — that's roughly two Americans killed by cops every day. One African American is killed by police, security guards or vigilantes every 28 hours.

It's breathtaking. And horrifying.

A good first step would be state laws creating a uniform protocol for reporting officer-involved deaths. This is something our Legislature could instate immediately, if it cared to do so.

There's a deep divide in this country about the import of police brutality — whether it's overblown or underreported, justifiable or evidence of systemic bias. No matter which side of this divide you stand on, we should all agree on the need for ironclad data. To solve the problem, we must first define it.